Project graphics_card1

This chapter is a short summary of chapter 2 of Tom MILLERs book:Managed DirectX 9 Graphics and Game Programming. SAMS 2003, ISBN: 0-672-32596-9. US$ 34.99.
The program displays the available information of Your computer about its grphics board an its DirectX-driver. This information is necessary for the computer games that normally try to use all the facilities of Your graphics hardware.

If You can't find a Solution Explorer-window, open it via the main menu: View → Solution Explorer.
Inside the Solution Explorer-window click the plus-sign in front of mesh_viewer1. A tree opens. Look for the branch "References". Right-click References and left-click Add Reference.... An Add Reference dialog box opens. Scroll down to the component name: Microsoft.DirectX3D Version 1.0.2902.0.
Highlight this reference by a left-click and quit the Add Reference Dialog Box with OK.
Check if the reference Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D is now visible inside the Solution Explorer window underneath graphics_card1 → References.

More Information

1. Multimon capability: New graphics cards all have dual head support, which allow two monitors to be attached to a single graphics card. Direct3D treats both hookups (regardless if DVI or VGA) as two adapters.

2. "Manager" is a static class in the Direct3D assemblies to enumerate adapters, driver info and to retrieve its capabilities.

5. While the list of formats is quite large, there are only a few that are valid and can be used as a Direct3D display or back buffer format. Valid Direct3D formats are: X8R8G8B8, R5G6B5, X1R5G5B5, A2R10G10B10. DirectX3D is not possible when the adapter does not support one of these.

6. You could use the Manager class to find out, whether or not your graphics card supports a particular format. Example: bool b = Manager.CheckDeviceFormatConversion(0, DeviceType.Hardware, Format.X8R8G8B8, Format.A8R8G8B8, true); (The 3. and 4. parameter refer to the front buffer and the back buffer. The 5. denotes WindowedMode=true or FullScreenMode=false)

7. The function Manager.GetDeviceCaps generates a Cap structure containing every possible capability a graphics card and its driver can have. These hundreds of capabilities are broken down mainly into Boolean values (i.e. feature supported or not) and integer values (i.e. max. no. of features).